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kleinbl00  ·  882 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How Bitcoin Ends  ·  

Gonna be inline snark 'cuz that's all this is worth

    How about that for a click-bait-y title?

That's all he does. use that magnifying glass at the upper right and search for "rushkoff" and tell me otherwise. Rushkoff is the edgelord's Michio Kaku.

    Watching the bitcoin phenomenon is a bit like watching the three-decade decline of the internet from a playspace for the counterculture to one for venture capitalists.

It was absolutely instantaneous. NCSA Mosaic was developed with public money and released in April 1993. Marc Andreesen took the code and released Netscape for profit in October 1994. He sold it to AOL for $4.3b four years later and immediately got into for-profit hosting. There's this idea that the Web was somehow going to be an altruistic cypherpunk utopia without anyone paying attention to the fact that there have been exactly zero altruistic cypherpunks.

    We thought the net would break the monopoly of top-down, corporate media.

No one ever thought this. They just paid lip service to it so they could ignore patents and trademarks.

    But as business interests took over it has become primarily a delivery system for streaming television to consumers, and consumer data to advertisers.

LOL and they sold it as net neutrality

    Likewise, bitcoin was intended to break the monopoly of the banking system over central currency and credit.

Bitcoin was intended to circumvent tariffs and taxes. Nobody intends to "circumvent the banking system" by taking the books and making them universally public.

    In return for dedicating all that hardware and wattage authenticating transactions and recording them in a ledger known as the blockchain, they are rewarded with bitcoin. It is their verification activity that mines new bitcoin into existence. And the more bitcoin they have, the more committed they will be to maintaining the integrity of the blockchain recording their assets.

I mean, you can sell bitcoin. Used ASIC miners? Not nearly as liquid. What keeps miners committed to the integrity of the blockchain is their investment in the ecosystem. If anything the past couple years have taught us that miners give no fux about politics or geography, they go where the power is cheapest, even if it's Texas.

    In essence, bitcoin is money built and maintained by nerds, based on the premise that good nerds will outnumber the bad nerds.

I doubt you'll find many nerds ascribing to "good" vs. "bad" considering how many of them are libertarians. The argument isn't "we do this for good" it's "you can't tell me what to do."

    Sure, bad actors can dedicate all of their processing power to fake transactions, but they will be outnumbered by those who want the token to work properly.

Miners are resistant to 51% attacks because they lose money. "Working properly" has nothing to do with it. It's kinda weird that Rushkoff is building an argument that Bitcoin was intended to be something out of the Whole Earth Catalog and is now something out of the Sears Catalog rather than observing that a bunch of arrogant nerds thought they could out-computer the government but whatever.

    At its most ambitious, bitcoin is meant to provide an anonymous, decentralized, frictionless, and incorruptible form of transaction–an alternative to the extractive, central, bank-issued currencies now enjoying a virtual monopoly in our economies.

"Extractive" was never the argument - "manipulated" was the beef. of course, BTC manipulation is trivial compared to markets (see, for example, the massive sell-off this morning to cover last night's futures) and that argument could certainly be made, and has been made. Yet Rushkoff seems to be going for a "betrayal of principles" thing here, an odd position to take considering the general chaotic neutral disposition of the average bitcoiner.

    Cryptocurrencies aren’t just about increasing efficiency, but taking down an economic elite that has been using its control over currency to maintain its wealth and power.

Do let's not confuse "elites" with "governments." Which, oddly enough, is an even more laughable assertion but nonetheless one of the core Bitcoin beliefs.

    Central currency is not the only kind of money that ever existed. For many centuries, gold and other precious metals served as money.

There is very little evidence of this. The monetary value of a shekel is fully 1500 years older than shekel coins. The Romans used base metals that were always substantially less valuable than the units of currency they represented. The Chinese used paper money. Only certain backward barbarian kingdoms of the European Middle Ages had coins worth their raw materials. It is accepted as gospel truth that we've always traded with gold and silver, but the fact of the matter is, we've always made jewelry out of gold and silver and used bookkeeping for trade.

    The problem with gold was that it was so scarce and valuable in its own right, that no one wanted to spend it on daily necessities such as bread or chicken. Gold was hoarded, and really only useful for long-distance trading between the wealthy.

I love how these sorts of diatribes always include some form of "we used to use nothing but barter, but barter also sucked" or "we used to use nothing but gold and silver, but gold and silver sucked." It's Van Danicken Syndrome through and through - "us moderns can clearly distinguish how stupid this idea was, but people born before the invention of Twinkies had entirely smooth forelobes and could barely brush their teeth." The fucking Incas were absolutely baffled why the Spaniards cared so much about gold. So were the Aztecs. Gold and silver were an obsession for that period of time between "Gibbon" and "Era Gibbon wrote about" and since nobody wrote about anything in between, we just assumed we'd always used gold and silver for everything even though it absolutely sucks for trade.

    During the Crusades, however, many European communities adopted the more flexible market money systems they had seen used in Moorish territories.

Even primitive Europeans immediately realized how stupid gold was the minute they were shown anything else

    Market money was virtually worthless: like a poker chip or IOU that was redeemed for a loaf of bread or dozen eggs at the end of the day. Unlike gold, which was no good for transactions because it was too scarce, market moneys existed only to enable trade, and often expired at the end of the day. They couldn’t be stashed.

It was actually Marco Polo who introduced Europe to paper money. He even wrote a book about it. inter-village trade was always based on favor economies because it has always been based on favor economies and if you tried to say Jane didn't owe you a dozen eggs because Jane didn't redeem her egg coupon before sunset everyone around you would kick you out of the village and then ask you why they'd bother with a system of account that required a priest since everyone was illiterate.

    But this sort of money was fabulous for trade, which was the whole point of money, anyway. Everybody who had a way of creating value–whether making shoes or growing grain–now had a way of exchanging that value with others. The use of market moneys led to a century or two of wealth creation unlike any we’ve ever seen since.

Or... you know... the Italian city-states created fractional reserve banking.

    The former peasants of feudalism became the merchant middle class, working just three or four days a week, and exhibiting a level of skeletal growth (a sign of health) larger than at any time in the history of humanity, until the 1980s.

Or... you know... the Jews became the merchant middle class because they weren't allowed to work or own land

    The problem was that the aristocracy, who hadn’t created value themselves for hundreds of years, was losing its stranglehold over the masses. As the poor grew wealthy, the wealthy grew relatively poorer. So they outlawed local moneys, and replaced them with central currency.

...seems like that would warrant a link. Or a footnote. Or an example. Or the part of Rushkoff's colon that it was removed from.

"Central" is it relates to Feudal Europe is particularly hilarious considering that it was a mess of Medicis, Borgias, Hapsburgs, Forzas and other families that didn't give a fuck about the peasants so long as they paid their taxes. You are now aware that Italians have been speaking Italian since shortly after the American Civil War and that the rulers of Russia mostly spoke French. England's royal family changed their name from "Saxe-Coburg Gotha" to "Windsor" at the outbreak of The Great War.

    All money was borrowed from the central treasury, at a rate of interest set by the king. People had to pay back more than they borrowed. It was a terrible drain

The drain was taxation. Always has been. This is weirdly wrong. I mean, even people with a real itch against central banks will tell you they're a modern phenomenon.

    The rising merchant middle class of the late Middle Ages became incapable of transacting on their own; the money was just too expensive.

This is directly wrong and incredibly nuts. The issue of the middle ages was paying for conflict, which is one of the reasons the Medicis came to power. Inflation is actually a modern phenomenon, as catalogued exhaustively by Piketty.

    The merchant class became peasants and laborers again, the cities became the only place to work, and the plague soon followed.

It had nothing at all to do with Trade. Bocaccio's Decameron certainly wasn't about a bunch of bored travelers sitting out a quarantine, and when Engels wrote "The Condition of The Working Class of England in 1844" everyone knew he meant 1244. Shit's gettin' WIERD man

    And that’s the system we’re stuck with today, with central banks issuing money, and banking conglomerates lending it to the public and verifying our transactions for a fee.

LOL

    Bitcoin was meant to cut out those unnecessary intermediaries, and replace them with computer cycles. The high processing cost of mining bitcoin–as well as an arbitrary limit on the total number of coin that can ever be mined–keeps the money supply scarce.

Right - 'cuz as we all know, the bitcoin is indivisible which means it cannot be used to trade for anything worth less than one bitcoin.

    But this means that instead of re-creating those high-velocity market monies of the Middle Ages, the abundant ones that worked like poker chips, bitcoin re-creates the market mechanisms of gold, a currency that invites hoarding and speculation while discouraging transactions. Oops.

Ladies and gentlemen, cargo cult economics. I've never seen the like.

    This explains why bitcoin has become less a means of exchange than a speculative pyramid, as well as why the coin’s developers and early investors have ended up billionaires.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

    The wealth disparity in bitcoin is worse than that of central currency, with 4 percent of users owning 96 percent of bitcoin. So much for breaking the banking monopoly; this is just hackers seizing the banking industry for themselves.

Well... but by definition, the guys who bought early are... not banks. Just because the Bolsheviks replaced one bad system with another does not mean the Romanovs survived.

    The money itself is worthless. Less than worthless, in fact. We are spending massive amounts of machine cycles and electricity, burning fossils fuels for no reason other than to prove our commitment to the coin.

I mean yeah people do stupid shit for money. I'm not entirely sure Bitcoin is that much more offensive than influencers selling jars full of farts but in a capitalist economy you do what gets you paid.

    What if the “proof of work” for coin were based on something good for the world, rather than aiming so directly for ecological self-destruction?

Ahhh yes. "Proof of plant and other stories by people who don't get it"

    The non-financial uses of the blockchain are certainly inspiring: Smart contracts let people devise and administrate complicated agreements without hiring lawyers. Whole companies and co-ops can be orchestrated and secured through simple sets of instructions that are confirmed and recorded on a blockchain such as Ethereum.

(waves hands) "you know, crypto-whatever stuff."

    It requires a whole lot of code and electricity, however,

Or so I read in USA Today and investigated no further

    Still, even if such currency and contract solutions can work, the part of the story that nobody’s talking about is the ending.

My name is Douglas Rushkoff, and I talked to exactly zero experts about this column

    What happens when all the bitcoin is mined?

Douglas Rushkoff has never learned of asymptotes apparently. "Whelp, gentlemen, that was the last bitcoin. It was fun but now we have to get jobs." (flips switch)

    Bitcoin transactions are authenticated by the thousands of people who dedicate their computers and electricity to building the blockchain.

Of course the argument up to this point would be the utter lack of people but go off I guess

    What is the incentive for people to spend millions of dollars on computers and power once there’s no more kickback of coin?

Oh my god he didn't even google it

    I have asked this question of the world’s leading blockchain investors, miners, and scholars, and none of them have offered a satisfactory answer.

I would pay real money to be a fly on the wall for those convos.

    The best they can come up with is “we’ll figure out when the time comes.” (How is that good enough justification for a combined quarter of a trillion dollar bet on cryptocurrencies?)

wait how old is this

    I spoke to the CEOs of four companies that have either just issued or are about to issue tokens, and none of them had even considered how the blockchain is administrated once the coin is all mined, or what that means to the future of their operations.

Was one of them DOGE? 'cuz I feel like one of them was DOGE. Quarter trillion dollar marketcap would be November 2017. So maybe not DOGE.

    So what will really happen when all the bitcoin is mined? The people and companies currently authenticating transactions for coin will instead insist on service fees.

I... I have nothing but side-eye.

    Already, financial institutions like banks and brokerage houses are rising to the occasion, promoting their own blockchain– as well as authentication services for those who want to keep using existing cryptocurrencies.

This is turning into some weird fever-dream out of the mind of John McAfee.

    So instead of disrupting and replacing the banking industry and its fees, bitcoin and other blockchains simply feed into the banking monopolies.

I mean of course they will. They deal with money and they don't care what kind it is. The world has been running on SWIFT, not dollars, for decades now. Thinking anything else is mockably naive. But the random shit Rushkoff is pulling out of his ass is legitimately unsettling.

    Like the internet, it was meant to engender trust by connecting people directly to one another.

Good old Internet, the world's first trust protocol. It certainly wasn't meant to exchange data.

    This post originally appeared on Fast Company and was published March 1, 2018.

Ahhh, there it is. Topical as ever, Fast Company. And Pocket, giving you psychedelic little fever dreams from The Before Times in an attempt to keep you engaged.

Well, I sank an hour into it just for the snark, so thanks I guess. But holy shit.

Oh, you had a question:

    I'm curious about all y'alls thoughts on this.

My thought is "google 'bitcoin difficulty chart.'" Or if you prefer:

You are standing 21 steps from the wall. Every ten seconds, you walk halfway to the wall. How many seconds until you reach it?

'cuz the reward for mining bitcoin goes down 50% every certain number of blocks. It's called a "halving." You can look that up, too - it happened at block 210,000, block 420,000, block 630,000, block 840,000, block 1,030,000 etc. And yes, because there's a discreet number of bitcoin, eventually (theoretically) the last one will be mined... but right now, that's predicted to happen in the year 2140.

At which point an ANTminer will be the technological equivalent of this guy.

So maybe there are other things to worry about.

lil  ·  1261 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: April 21, 2021  ·  

I don’t believe in “work-life balance.” I don’t think our experience of living is binary. Life is life and can include work, nature, climbing, biking, picking up aluminum, parent care, child care, studying, and so on.

If we need, say, music in our lives and don’t have it, be attuned to the hunger. If you don’t feed yourself what you need (rest, contact with others, touch, hockey, whatever) you might become passive-aggressive, aggressive, or even develop panic attacks.

flac  ·  1547 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: First song I recorded in my new home -- if you are a musician, add to it  ·  

https://clyp.it/usexn1kh?token=6b246bf67f75305854b843d44de20023

I'm gearing up for a move myself, felt inspired to write about it and lay down some really quick vocal tracks. Might re-record later [EDIT: I have, indeed, re-recorded the vocals. Much happier]. I sped the tempo up to 145 and pitched it up so it's in the key of F major.

I'm missing you Hubski folks - my life has been really crazy the past few months, but I'm hoping things will settle down again soon. Expect to see me in a pubski soon...

LYRICS:

A new start, carried in cardboard

piled up on the stairs

we packed up all the sins we could bear

Oh, we're starting to ache

bags are starting to tear

OK, I guess we'll leave 'em right there

You thought you heard a ghost

You swore you saw her

T-shirts from all the old concerts

stuffed into a drawer

we never have the time anymore

Too tired to set up the bedframe

we'll sleep on the floor

and talk all night like we did before

We felt like we were kids

We felt like having...

How long 'til I can say this is where I'm from?

How will I know when my real life has begun?

Where will my ghost haunt?

Where will my ghost haunt?

steve  ·  1829 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: October 2, 2019  ·  

Early pub. I like it.

I’ve been carpooling with a bloke who lives nearby. The older I get, the more I realize we’re all very similar when we let our guards down and look for the best in people.

We let someone go at work this week. It’s never easy, but this one was the right time for the right reasons.

I’m still recovering from a vacation. I know that may sound strange, but it’s a thing. Between time zone differences, piled up work, inspiration overload, and general life evaluation - it’s been a rough couple of weeks. I’ll say this though - I am a blessed/fortunate man who has had more opportunity than most, and I don’t want to waste another minute.

I love you all. I don’t drink, but I feel drunk. My guard is down. My heart is full. I’d hug you if you were in front of me. Maybe you need one. I usually do. But if hugs aren’t your thing, a high five, a smile, or just a knowing glance. I’m here. You’re here. We can just be.

So here’s to you Hubski... I raise my metaphorical glass to you. And to you. And to this place. And to mk... wherever he is this week...thanks for opening early.

flac  ·  1877 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: August 14, 2019  ·  x 2

Married.

More to follow after honeymoon.

someguyfromcanada  ·  2046 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Who Is Left on Hubski?  ·  

Name: sgfc

Location: Canada

Geez my first account here (sgfc) is almost 7 years old. And I have not posted or commented in a very long time.

I quit drinking and dropped 40 pounds to 155 now. My body has been my enemy since May and a medical situation gave me the kick in the ass to start changing.

Stopping booze was easy even though I admittedly am a die hard alkie. Average evening would be 15 to 20 units for 15 years. I miss booze and I miss hanging out with fun drunks. The social aspect has been the biggest hurdle for me. For example, I was invited to a 4 day trip to Nashville. Never been there and would love to go and hang out in bars listening to music all day. How does one do that without drinking? How could anyone possibly want to listen to country music for hours without drinking? I don't know.

Still the primary caregiver for my Mom with advanced Alzheimers. What a shit show that is. She is sure that she hates me. Her body is steady but her brain is lost. There is no exit strategy that will not be heart-breaking. Ugh.

My mood is also very different. In a good way. From sometimes not sleeping for a couple of days, to at least 5 solid hours every night. Sleep is good. Energy way up. Productivity way up. Down to 2 cigs a day and headed towards zero. Have been taking CBD drops twice a day and smoking THC before bed. Feels good man.

insomniasexx  ·  2046 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Who Is Left on Hubski?  ·  x 3

hellloooooooo, this is how my life is now.

necroptosis  ·  2528 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: November 1, 2017  ·  

Things are moving fast.. Turns out it's a lot of work to move halfway across the world. Who would've thought?

I had my stem cells pulled by forever labs yesterday. None other then thenewgreen himself appeared before the procedure! Unsurprisingly he's an astoundingly awesome guy. I don't think I've ever seen anyone so enthusiastic at 645 in the morning(especially after I mentioned finding FL through hubski). We very briefly talked about FL, hubski, and ethereum. I don't think the conversation could have been any more hubski.

In other news I finished up my skydiving A license. Are there any skydivers around this site? I may start trying to convince people. Seriously, it's amazing.

https://imgur.com/a/3VrX3

cW  ·  2701 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Neoliberalism is creating loneliness  ·  

Thanks for this. I connect with your descriptions of the ache of disconnection, even though my situations are all different. I'm rich in friends, even though most of them are scattered so far, and that is its own kind of different pain. Ibuprofen for social pain makes good sense, though I'd never thought of it before. It seems inflammation is the problem regardless, doesn't matter if the trigger is externally or internally initiated. I've been consuming turmeric paste in my coffee to combat inflammation, rhodiola rosea when I need a sanguine shot of energy, and kava kava when I need to chill. It does well enough most of the time.

I really enjoyed that How To Be Alone video. It's beautiful, and contains lots of helpful stuff in it, threads from some of the best traditions which promote solitude. I'm thinking of that Pascal quote right now, “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone," though I think he was selling it from the negative, rather than positive side. The Buddhist version sees the solitude as the link to the real source of connection, beyond people. That's present in some Christian mystics' thought as well. Not sure if it's what Pascal was getting at though. Regardless, we need a functional web of social interconnection whenever we leave the cell of solitude, meditation, prayer, what have you. That web's not there on its own though, and I find myself hamfistedly trying to pretend it is, or weave together a few inches of it. Playing music with strangers has been the best catalyst for unexpected connection lately.

Are you an Alaskan currently? I've never been, but I have a friend who moved out to Homer. He tells me it's one of the best places on earth.

If you make your facebook ad, let me know. I'd like to see it. You should cc: the guy who wrote the guardian article too, if you do.

cgod  ·  2819 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: It's Official: Sixteen Government Agencies Now Have Access To Unminimized Domestic NSA Collections  ·  

I'm not joking and I don't think my views are dumb.

I'm comfortable with you not agreeing with me, you have your own belifes and values, doesn't make you right or me wrong to value and worry about different things.

Nice knee jerk, doesn't agree with me so it's dumb.

cgod  ·  2901 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: So long hubski   ·  

Not advising you to do one thing or the other but I urge you to consider if giving up some freedom right now could help you achieve more freedom later.

You don't sound very free.

user-inactivated  ·  2917 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A lil shindig in Hampden, Baltimore  ·  

5. myself

thenewgreen

moe  ·  2991 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: [48 HOURS] Shockingly, original journalism didn't save Reddit  ·  

    If we can pull enough donations

Oo Hubski's funding meter isn't anywhere close to target.

steve, you still matchin'? doot